Free Internet Marketing Lessons

by Edward Gause

These days, getting a high ranking is not enough, because your pages won't stay there without a little help. I will show you one way of doing that.


More and more search engines are ranking pages higher based on link popularity (translated: how many external links on the web point to your web site). The best known method of improving link popularity is seeking out other sites that compliment yours and asking the webmaster to swap links with you. This is call "Reciprocal Linking". The downside of this promotional method is that it is extremely time consuming locating potential sites and then asking for a link.


One promotional method I've come up with, that's a little less time consuming, to ask for reciprocal links is setting up a mutually beneficial referral system. I call it my "partner program" because in reality, a partnership is formed with the agreement of drumming up traffic for both webmasters.


The Referral Partner program works this way:


The more visitors a partner site sends you, the higher the ranking their site will be placed on your referral page. As visitors browse the page, they will visit some of these sites. To make my offer a little more enticing, I also publish the top 3 partner sites in my newsletter.


Sounds good so far? Now, let's get on with setting it up. (note: You will need perl access to set up this program)


1. Go to ScriptSolutions (http://www.scriptsolutions .com/) and download a copy of their free "ReferralMadness" script.


2. Follow the simple instructions for installing the script on your server. If you have any difficulty, let me know and I'll be glad to assist you.


3. Prepare a written offer to send your prospects. Here's the one I sent to my newsletter subscribers:


*****************************************
Hi [Person's First Name],


I just installed a new page at my site for referral partners and would like to offer you the first opportunity, as a Cynted Chronicle subscriber, to get listed as one of my top partners.


If you have a site related to Marketing, Website Promotion or Website Design, please drop by and consider signing up.


The Referral Partner program works this way: The more visitors you send us, the higher the ranking you'll receive in this section.


The higher the ranking, the more visible your site is to others who visit this section. I will be promoting this page heavily. This will bring more traffic to your site as well.


Please visit http://cynted.com/ cgi-bin/rm/si gnup.cgi if you're interested.


Looking forward to hearing from you.


Regards,


[Your name here]
[Your website title here]
[Your URL here]
*****************************************


I also posted a modified version of the above letter to the following newsgroups:


- aol.commerce.misc-ads
- alt.biz.misc
- alt.business.home
- alt.business.home.pc
- alt.business.misc
- alt.business.misc.entrepreneurs
- alt.make.money.fast
- biz.comp.misc
- biz.entrepreneurs
- market.internet.free


Finally, I posted the request at a few discussion forums. Some popular forums that I recommend visiting are the Gethigh forum at http://gethighforums.com, the Free-Publicity Forum at http://free-publicity.com/ and the Internet Marketing Warriors' Forum at http://cynted.co m/recommends/ warrior.html


This is just to give you one idea of how to start building reciprocal links.



Notice: You may copy and use this article on your web site, ezine or any other publication provided you attach the following resource box:


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Edward Gause is webmaster of the Cynted Internet Marketing Center http://www.cynted.com?a2 and publisher of the Cynted Chronicle, a bi-weekly ezine targeting the interests of novice netmarketers. Get the latest advice, tips, tools and software for building a successful online career. To subscribe: mailto:subscribe@cy nted.com?subj ect=A2
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